Knowledge Yet No Memory
by May a Chance
Summary: There is a thin line between knowing and remembering; one boy likes to break this line with eleven thousand years of knowledge. Forgiveness for people insulted by my beliefs as to what happens to religion and the world. None of this is expected to happen, last I checked.


**I do not own this amazing franchise know as the Maze Runner. All rights go to James Dashner, the author of the Maze Runner, and his publishing company whom he probably sold the rights to. This story is written purely for my entertainment with nothing to do with profit or recognition. "I write what I want to write, I write what amuses me, it's totally for myself."- J.K. Rowling**

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For a boy who didn't even know his own name, he had a lot of information stored in his head. It was a flood of never-ending facts that began at the dawn of settled human history. It was as though the sun had risen one day to find people settled over the fertile lands of the River Nile, the boy reasoned. One day there was nothing but soft black soil and the next fields covering it with blankets of barley. The land of Ancient Egypt had yet to begin, certainly, but it was there as the dawn of civilized history and for that he accepted it. Before the year 3500 BCE, the planet that the boy understood was his home had simply been for groups of wanderers fighting every moment to survive in new terrain. And then came the Egyptian Calendar's creation marking the first civilized human history. It was a beautiful new time of coming knowledge just like the flood of information through the boy's mind.

Three hundred years later, the first Hieroglyphs were used as a form of writing full sentences. There was the bird that represented the modern English letter 'a', something invented a near 4000 years later that was to be used for the following seven thousand years. The 'r' was like a simple Frisbee seen from an angle; it was like the halo above an angels head. Angels; eagle, wave, hearth, grain, lion, cane. A_N_G_E_L_S. Angels. While the creatures had a strange tendency to be associated with the Christian Church, which had died out with the creation of the Infidelis autem Curch, which in itself was ridiculous as it was, a) in Latin, b) a group of atheists attending a church with holy ideals and c) out to kill other religions. Any religion refusing to renounce their own had been forced to join on pain of death- literally. Millions, perhaps even billions, had been killed without reason. It really was no joke that 99% of all wars through the history of the world had been about religion. It was ridiculous, to say the least.

But back to the point; angels had been believed to exist for as long as people had seen birds. They had instantly been awed by the wings and power of flight and wished it for their own; so they made up creatures that could fly just like the chirping birds did. It was only later that these wishes were believed to be truth in thousands of different religions. Naturally, with great power came great greed and the idea of Lucifer, the pretty and proud angel who had decided that he wanted to be God and hence became Satan, had been born. With that idea came fear of the highest degree. Witches and warlocks, created in the Middle Ages to represent the darkness of their life. The Christian Church had written off the beliefs as nonsense of the Pagan Church, but too those outside of the 'safe' abbeys, it was the truth of everyday life; they had been cursed and would never be freed from it.

It was strange, the boy considered as a new thought came to his mind. The Roman Empire had been the greatest super power the world had ever seen; it stood tall and proud for centuries before they had hired a Visigoth man named Alaric who would be the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Western only, of course for the East had lasted onwards for a good thousand years later at the end of the Middle Ages and the end of the Medieval Warm Period. But back to Alaric the King of the Visigoths. Hired as a mercenary, his legion training had been the only reason that Rome had fallen. After quitting the legion and amassing an army of 'barbarians' (a term used to mean 'not us'), coming from the Greek idea that everyone but them spoke in 'bar, bar, bar', he had laid siege to the city of Rome. Two long years later, Roman pride eroded away and the gates were opened. Quite literally, the Mother of the World had been killed.

But the East, on the other hand, had only been weakened by plague and Latin crusaders a thousand years after the historic sacking of Rome. To travel backwards a decent eight hundred years, and one would have found that Europe was a rather miserable place. Struggles to survive shown by the death of one in four newborns, one in eight children from ages one to four and one in sixteen children from ages five to nine. Through the harvest in the summer and the planting in autumn, families would be up to their eyes in work while all through winter and spring, they would sit in their homes attempting to keep warm despite the cold chill set upon the land through most of the year. For each plant they grew, a family would eat one seed and plant one seed.

Then came the Bubonic Plague, a disease that killed 50% of the earth's population. It was a bacteria, thank goodness, and it took only a week to kill a person. If one were lucky, they would fall into a coma before death but if not, they met a painful end. There were too many people to be buried. The boy's mind flashed to a more recent time when there had been too many people to be buried, the year 7024. A virus more dangerous than any other known to mankind had been created. Virus VC321xb47, 'popularly' referred to as the Flare, was _designed_ to kill in a matter of days yet instead it took months, years, and the disease spread. In a year, the population had dropped from ten billion to five billion non-infected individuals, a record low for the earth's population since the year 6701 when the population had first reached five billion. Within the next ten years, the population dropped farther. Three billion people struggled onwards, a mere one billion of them not infected by the disease that could be the end of them. But then, twelve years since the beginning of the "deadly virus that attacks the brain" (quote, unquote, Ava Paige) individuals appeared. A girl who lived in one of the most concentrated areas of Flare victims had wandered through the wasteland untouched and been healthy; she was quickly declared immune to the virus and suddenly there had been hope.

Hope for the Byzantine Empire in the midst of the Bubonic Plague had died along with it's leader, Justinian who had aimed to make the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake.

The memories of World War I and World War II passed in a blur to the boy. Everything did. Spanish Flu came and went in the blink of the eye compared to the long stretched of human history spent aimlessly wandering in search of a water spring. Massacres and civil wars joined with the Holy Wars and the Crusades. The endless fighting was constant until the year 2037. That was the year that there were no wars; it was peaceful save for the growing fear of Global Warming. The world had just come out of a slightly colder period to find the heat intensifying at an increasing rate. The low temperatures of a cold autumn day reached record highs while at the height of winter, there was no snow on the roofs for Santa's Sled and his reindeer.

'Global warming,' the boy reasoned. 'The only way to terrify the population of a peaceful earth.' But no, the next year riots exploded across the globe. The lights of life began to flicker like a candle in the wind. Hope was failing and without hope the world would die. Yet the earth held on; in 2049 global warming began to slow. The ice caps stopped melting and the arctic began to refreeze, but not until it was too late for the immense polar bears of the area. A species that had been only vulnerable twenty-four years previously disappeared, the 25000 bears going to just a few left in captivity. And even then, the bears died. 'Ironic, really. If they hung on just five more years they would have had a better world than any bear's known.'

Just a prolonged ice age. As the earth got colder yet, the crops beginning to fail and population dropping once again. Within six years, the earth had gone into a lockdown mode; the sun looked farther away each year as though they were drifting away. Within just five long years, most of the population fell into stasis as, with a final burst, the earth was sucked away from her mother sun and spiralled into the wide expanses of space. The earth froze over; the ice became absolute and the unprotected animals and plants died. Once again the situation was ironic; what could have saved the polar bears would also have killed them.

For millennia earth waited. The humans in stasis remained the same as they drifted through space aimlessly. By a stroke of luck, the earth spun even quicker than the speed of light as it travelled; yet another stroke of luck landed earth close to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Three stars in one solar system, bizarre but entirely possible and that was what earth grew accustomed to in the four thousand years they spent rocketing through space. In the year 6060, the earth thawed; those in stasis awoke to find their world barren. Despite the lack of plants and animals, they struggled onwards. It took a thousand years, thirty-some generations but they rebuilt; the frozen remains of New York city were resurrected. Tokyo grew to become yet another huge city once again. Languages died; with such a small population, just a billion (and one, naturally), the earth had need for only a single tongue, Esperanto. The world adapted and grew once again reaching numbers as high as five billion (and two) before the population exploded; over the course of ten years, the population had reached ten billion on the might-as-well-be-new planet.

New creatures emerged; the world changed for the better until the year just over a thousand years later; the Flare.

Children were quickly being declared immune; a mutation created through a rare blood type, O-. Double negative; the red blood cells consisted of unusually large amounts of oxygen constantly; without oxygen within the cell it would die almost instantly. No other blood types could be transferred to the strange system without being immediately killed by the body. It was just children at first but within five years teens popped up with O-. There was no known cause for the reasoning behind the blood type causing immunity; perhaps it was simply that constant contact with oxygen killed the virus. Perhaps there was something changed about the oxygen the O- blood carried but whatever the cause, those immune were both cursed and gifted. They would survive but they would also be tested.

World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department. Children were taken from their homes for testing and-

The memory stopped. The boy frowned in confusion; he had been enjoying something taking his mind off of his own lack of knowledge of himself and his surroundings; he was sitting in box cluttered with supplies. The boy had curled up on a pile of ropes as he flood of knowledge had filled him. In his hands was a small note written in a perfect hand: "Hello Mike," it read.

"Mike," the boy tested the name aloud; it didn't feel quite right and likely never would. No, he decided, Mike was not his name.

The swinging speed of the Box increased around him as the paper fluttered from the boy's hands and through a crack in the floor. All thought of names was forgotten as the boy fell into a fearful trance, arms curled over his knees.

Blinding light at brilliant glows. A rough hand gripped the boy's shoulder. His eyes snapped open before he landed a hard kick to the other boy's stomach. The blonde stumbled back, winded. A moment later he caught his breath before raising his hands from his stomach in a offering of peace; he remained hunched over. "Whoa there, mate. Didn't mean to startle ya." He had a strange accent, British the boy's mind instantly identified. "Name's Newt. Got a name?"

Mike was not the boy's name, so he answered with the best answer he had. "I don't think so?..." His voice trembled ferociously. "Where am I?"

"The Glade," someone from above said. The boy glanced up to see him surrounded. His heart began to beat faster. "Named so because it is the meadow of peace in a hellhole."

"Comforting," the boy muttered. He stood nervously, stretching his limp muscles. "Why is it a hellhole?" His mind was racing at a million miles a minute, picking up every detail of the strange area.

One boy let out a harsh laugh. All of those surrounding him were boys. " 'Cause we're surrounded by monsters."

"Comforting. Now, what year is it?"

The boys exchanged nervous glances. "Second since the first arrival? Actual years? 7048 last I checked. Why'da ask?"

"Because that means there's a nine-year-gap in which anything could have happened."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, mate. Explain. Nine-year-gap in what? You memories? You have memories?" That was the blonde, Newt, speaking again.

"Two many. Nine thousand years of info? Ten thousand? Nah, almost eleven thousand."

"Oh klunk."


End file.
